Atlas Globe

Ten places, one spinning world, and your score measured in kilometres of error

Single player
puzzle
geography
3d

▶ Play Atlas Globe Loads here in the page. No download, no account.

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About Atlas Globe

The globe you spin is built from real Natural Earth coastline and border data rather than a wrapped photograph, so the outlines under your finger are the ones on a proper map — and there is not a single country label anywhere on it. You are given a name and you drop a pin. That is the entire interaction, and everything difficult about the game lives in the gap between recognising a continent and knowing where on it a city actually sits.

A match is ten rounds drawn from a pool of fifty-three: thirty-five cities and eighteen landmarks, from Paris and Tokyo down through Ulaanbaatar and Quito to Petra, Easter Island and Victoria Falls. Each round is worth up to five thousand, and the score decays smoothly with distance rather than dropping off a cliff, so a guess two thousand kilometres out still banks something. The end card gives you your total, the percentage of the fifty thousand available, and the average distance you were off by — which is usually the number that stings.

What is different about this version

The difficulty settings change the question rather than the tolerance alone. Easy draws only from the fourteen best-known places and accepts anything within six hundred kilometres. Normal opens the pool up and tightens the bullseye to three hundred and fifty. Hard removes the famous fourteen entirely — so Paris and Tokyo never appear — cuts the bullseye to a hundred and fifty kilometres, and, crucially, stops printing the country underneath the name. On Easy and Normal the prompt tells you that Petra is in Jordan; on Hard you get the word Petra and nothing else. Landmarks are mixed in with the cities throughout, which is why the pool rewards a different sort of knowledge than a capitals quiz does.

How to play Atlas Globe

Choose Easy, Normal or Hard. The difficulty sets which places can come up, how close a perfect answer has to be, and whether you are told the country.
Read the prompt, then spin the globe until the right part of the world is facing you.
Zoom in if it helps, though the view resets to full globe at the start of every round.
Drop your pin on the spot. The true location then appears in gold with an arc drawn between the two and the distance in kilometres.
After ten rounds the totals appear, along with your average error.

Controls

Desktop	Drag to spin, scroll to zoom, click to place the pin; the arrow keys nudge the globe and plus and minus zoom.
Phone or tablet	Drag to spin, pinch to zoom, tap to place the pin.
Players	One player. Any other characters on screen are run by the game.

Strategy

The scoring curve should change how you guess. Points fall away smoothly with distance rather than by region, which means a confident wrong continent is catastrophic and a vague right one is not. Getting within two thousand kilometres is worth well over a third of a perfect answer, so when you genuinely do not know, put the pin in the middle of the region you are least unsure about instead of committing to a city you half-remember.

Where the points actually are is at the other end. Bullseyes pay the full five thousand flat, and on Normal that means landing inside three hundred and fifty kilometres — roughly the width of England. At that scale coastlines matter more than country shapes: find the right bay, the right river mouth, the right end of the right peninsula. The borders drawn on the globe let you count your way in from a shape you are certain about, which is why zooming out to confirm the neighbours before committing is worth the two seconds.

Hard is a different exercise because the country is withheld. There the name itself is the clue, and the useful habit is to ask what language it belongs to before asking where it is. Tashkent and Ulaanbaatar place themselves once you think that way, and the landmarks are often easier than the cities, because you probably know the photograph even if you have never thought about the coordinates.

Mistakes that cost you the game

Pinning at the first plausible spot the globe happens to be showing. The view carries over from the reveal, and it is easy to guess the same hemisphere twice without noticing.
Zooming in before you have found the region. Close up, one stretch of coast looks much like another and there are no labels to correct you.
Treating a near miss as a failure. Anything under eight hundred kilometres scores well, and a run of those beats a mix of bullseyes and wild guesses.

Tips

Anchor on a shape you cannot mistake — the boot of Italy, the horn of Africa, the Korean peninsula — and count outward.
For coastal cities, aim at the water rather than the land. Ports sit on the line, and pinning inland loses a few hundred kilometres for nothing.
Read the arc on the reveal, not just the number. Seeing which way you were wrong is what stops the error repeating.
Move up to Hard once Normal stops surprising you. Losing the country hint changes the game far more than the tighter radius does.

Questions about Atlas Globe

Am I being asked for countries?

No — cities and landmarks. The country appears as a hint on Easy and Normal, and is withheld on Hard.

What does a near miss actually earn?

Quite a lot. Landing inside the bullseye pays five thousand flat, and outside it the value falls away smoothly with distance rather than in steps.

Will I see the same places repeatedly?

On Easy, often — its ten rounds come from a pool of only fourteen. Normal and Hard pull from much wider lists.

Can I stay zoomed in between rounds?

No. The globe returns to its full view each round, so every question starts the same way.

Does it cost anything?

No. Atlas Globe is free to play, runs in your browser, and needs no download, install or account.

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